The supper buffet at Singapore’s Grand Hyatt hotel normally costs customers approximately $70 and features a delicious assortment of satay chicken, wok-fried mud crab, and chilled tiger prawns. For a tenth of that cost, those on a stricter budget who also care about sustainability can fill a box. Tech entrepreneurs in Asia are using food that would have otherwise gone to waste to offer cheap meals through mobile phone apps.
According to Preston Wong, chief executive officer and co-founder of Treatsure, which collaborates with chains including the Hyatt, Accor Group and the Singapore Marriott Tang Plaza Hotel to allow app users to pick out and collect a “buffet-in-a-box” of food that would otherwise be thrown out, Treatsure has more than 30,000 customers and has prevented the waste of 30 metric tonnes of food since its introduction in 2017.
Users normally have to wait until the end of service before they can pick up their meals. Even still, that’s a long cry from Singapore’s 817,000 tonnes of food waste in 2021, a 23% increase from the previous year. According to officials, Semakau, Singapore’s sole landfill, should be able to handle all of the country’s solid waste disposal requirements through at least 2035.
Hong Kong has comparable issues. According to Hong Kong’s Environmental Protection Department, it has already filled 13 landfills and will continue to fill the remaining sites through 2020 at a rate of around 3,300 tonnes of food waste each day.
“The space is very limited,” said Anne-Claire Béraud, Hong Kong country manager of Phenix by OnTheList, an app launched in the territory last year. “Everything is very dense so there isn’t a lot of space to treat all this waste.”
Users of the app can pick up a “Mystery Basket” of food for at least a 50% discount from places like Pret A Manger and a nearby cake business called The Cakery. According to the business, it has sold 25,000 baskets thus far, preventing the waste of 4.5 kilogrammes of CO2 and around 1 kilogramme of food.
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The original Phenix platform was introduced in France in 2014 and then spread to four other European nations, saving 150 million meals. To launch the app in Asia, it worked with the flash sale startup OnTheList. In contrast to North America and Europe, where regulations are being strictly enforced, Asia is still in the early stages of developing the idea of sustainable food. Unsold food from supermarkets is already prohibited in France, while Spain has proposed laws to reduce waste by fining businesses. Laws have been passed in US states like California and New Jersey to lessen the quantity of food that ends up in landfills.
(with inputs from agencies)
